Abstract
Drawing from internal memoranda available in Justice Harry Blackmun’s papers in the Library of Congress, this chapter reconstructs the behind-the-scenes decision making in two prisoners’ rights cases. In Estelle v. Gamble (1976), memoranda show how Justice Marshall accommodated various suggestions from other justices about the wording of his majority opinion. Marshall compromised his reasoning in order to retain the support of other justices. In Houchins v. KQED (1978), the reasoning articulated in Justice Stevens’s initial draft of the majority opinion led Justice Potter Stewart to change his vote. Stewart’s shift created a different majority coalition and thereby turned Stevens’s opinion into a dissent. These cases illustrate the role of strategic interactions within the Supreme Court.
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References
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Smith, C.E. (2016). Strategic Interaction: Persuasion and Accommodation in Opinion Writing. In: The Supreme Court and the Development of Law. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56763-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56763-5_7
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